"Fiction is like a spider's web, [...] still attached to life at all four corners."

[What he uses on Alois Trancy is simple demon magic; nothing more, nothing less. It feels like fixing a crack in a plate, or conjuring dirt into tile. Claude mends Alois’ skin and veins and tissue until nothing remains of the wound but the tear in Alois’ clothing. He pauses. He wonders if he has made a mistake. Somewhere, he knows he has. There are laws to govern everything, even in Hell, and demons are not supposed to reveal that magic, even in the smallest amounts, in front of any mortal creature.

Still, Alois was suspended so thoroughly between life and death that he was likely an exception, and he is less mortal anyway than most people would know. Claude uses that as justification for breaking the rules of the natural order of demons, rules he holds dear, rules which detail the way things should be. Besides, Alois is his tie to this realm, and he needs to stay in this realm. He needs—

The tingling in his very essence which still remains, minutes after he tasted Ciel Phantomhive’s blood, lessens the impact of the slap. He barely feels it.

However, now that Claude's attention has been brought back to this world, he notices that his master's blood is everywhere. His first thought is not that he will have to clean it up.

That thought is his third thought.

His first is to wonder whether it would taste as good as Ciel’s.

His second is to decide that it would not, and, therefore, he doesn’t even try it.

It is then, when he is thinking that third thought, that he is aware that something has changed irrevocably in his bond with his master. And Alois, covered in blood and tears and mucus and saliva, appearing so very, very mortal…he now struggles against Claude. Claude almost has to force himself to react to it.]

You are still weak, my master. [He doesn’t move to placate Alois with a reassuring touch, as he usually would, but he does keep Alois from squirming out of his grasp.] Allow me to…

[And he shifts his grip, intending to lift Alois up and carry him away from all of the blood, for both of their sakes. The entire room still smells of